Alphabetical Movie – Hot Tub Time Machine

Hang on, you ask, isn’t that a wacky comedy about how some guys travel back in time to the 80’s so they can relive their mis-spent youth and possibly learn some valuable life lessons?

Yeah.

So how is that creepy?

Well, my friend, let me tell you (spoilers a-comin’):

At the end of the film, one of them decides that he is not going to travel back to the future with the others so he can repair his terribly messed up life. The others travel forward in time and return to a life that is far better than the one they just left because their buddy “fixed” everything.

Their buddy is rich and happily married. They are both in dream jobs and involved in relationships with the Perfect Women (TM).

So how is that creepy?

Because they don’t remember a minute of it.

John Cusack comes home to find out that he hooked up with the Perfect Woman (TM) he met back in the 80’s and has been married to her for, we assume, 20 years. There are pictures on the wall everything. What does he remember?

The crappy ass 20 years that he’d lived when he wasn’t married to her.

When he talks to his wife, what’s he going to say? Tell me about our wedding, honey? Do we have any children? What are their names???

Craig Robinson returns to discover he has become a very successful producer in the music industry. How are things going to go when a client that he has known for fifteen years walks in and he doesn’t even remember them?

What if he has to go out and perform at a gig and he doesn’t remember the words to the songs he wrote? What if he has to produce a record for someone given that he has never done it before?

Then you have Clark Duke, who returns home to find that his mom is not a single mother and is married to his dad who, we have discovered, was the friend who chose to stay in the past.

What are the odds Duke would have turned out to be exactly the same person if his home life had changed that dramatically? Would his parents send him to therapy because his entire personality (and probably physical appearance) had changed over the course of a weekend?

I mean sure, dad knows what is going on but I think mom is going to be a little bit freaked out. Not only that but until dad figured out that he was the father (less than 24 hours ago), he’d treated his kid like shit.

What is going to happen to these guys? Will their memory gradually return so they can recall the lives that they theoretically lived or will they continue to remember the crappy lives they’d had before their pal/father made everything perfect for them? I presume we are dealing with an alternate timeline theory and that means they will never remember the last twenty years any other way.

Except that doesn’t make sense because the moment the son prevented his father from ejaculating, he ceased to exist. Briefly.

If I were John Cusack, I’d be pissed as hell. He was going to stay behind but his “buddy” pushed him into the hot tub and sent him back to the future. I guess that was supposed to be a gesture of friendship but in hindsight, he robbed Cusack of twenty really awesome years, didn’t he?

You know who had the exact same thing happen to them? Marty McFly in Back to the Future! He gets home and discovers that his life, that used to suck, was suddenly awesome. Except he didn’t remember any of it!

What else do those two movies have in common?

Crispin Glover!!! AAAAAAAAA!!!!

I think they need a sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine where we see these characters two years later and see how messed up their lives have become again. Cusack will be divorced because he doesn’t even remember his wife. Robinson will be unemployed because he no longer knows how to do his job. Duke is probably going to end up a stoner constantly trying to reconcile his memories of a terrible childhood with his new life as a child of ridiculously rich parents – one of whom used to hate him.

The whole sequel would be about the three of them trying to find a new time machine just so they could go back in time and stay there.